While PennDOT has been able to chip away at its bad bridge problem thanks to a 2013 law that provided an influx of money for road projects, local governments haven't been able to address their bridge problems as directly.

Across Pennsylvania about 6,500 locally owned bridges are considered "structurally deficient." Fixing them can be a challenge for small communities with tight budgets and few in-house resources.

But a northeastern Pennsylvania county is set to fix 33 bad bridges in one fell swoop and, if the project proves successful, potentially clear out its inventory of 99 structurally deficient or deteriorating bridges over the next few decades. It is able to do so through a public-private partnership, or P3 arrangement, similar to a program PennDOT rolled two years ago out to fix 558 bridges across the commonwealth.

Indeed, Northampton County's Executive John Brown said the PennDOT program was the catalyst for his county's arrangement, which calls for a private construction firm (Kriger Construction) to build the 33 bridges over the next three years at a cost of $37.5 million. Northampton's project is the first P3 transportation project conducted at the county-level in the nation.

Brown and his county maintenance manager, Stan Rugis, said their program will save the county time and money compared with the traditional let-bid and bond-funded model.

"This is the cheapest way to do it," Rugis said. "This brings economy of scale into the equation and shared logistics to get everything done cheaper ... instead of doing one bridge at a time, the contractor can mobilize and centrally locate equipment to work on two or three at once."

Rugis and Brown estimated the P3 approach will save the county between 20 and 30 percent per bridge, and are hoping it could serve as a model for other counties and municipalities in Pennsylvania.

"Quite frankly we don't have enough funding for the state to take care of everything, not to mention smaller governments," Brown said. "'This opens up potentially another level of financing that hasn't been tapped before for dealing with local infrastructure."

But the county couldn't simply contract with the builder itself. While Pennsylvania's P3 law allows for the state to do so, counties and municipalities are, by themselves, not allowed to enter into these types of agreements.

So what Northampton did was route the project through the county's general authority, which by law is allowed to enter into P3-style contracts.

It gets a little complicated, but the basic crux of Northampton's program works like this: The county deeded its bridges to the authority, which in turn signed a rehabilitation and maintenance contract with Kriger Construction. Kriger lined up the financing to build the bridges and proposed a set 10-year payment schedule with the authority. Because the authority doesn't have its own income or revenue, the county agreed to pay the authority an annual "service" fee -- which would mirror the annual payments due to Kriger by the authority.

Those annual payments begin at around $4 million, Brown said, but trend lower after the first five years until the payments end in year 10. The county, vis-a-vis the authority, also required Kriger to agree to a 10-year maintenance window to account for any problems that could crop-up after construction.

There are also no federal or state funds used for the project Brown said, although PennDOT did provide extensive assistance to get the project moving. The department provided the county with its P3 manual, and had local staff work with the Northampton team through the design and selection process.

"PennDOT has been great to work with," Rugis said.

Even though the project required the county to blaze new ground -- and jump through requisite legal hoops -- both Brown and Rugis said they believe using this framework will save the county both time and money, as well as push much of the risk associated with a large construction project onto the contractor.

Brown said when the county submitted its request for proposals, it had four construction firms express interest in the project. When the county did so, it included information on how much it was willing to spend annually on the project. Doing that, Brown said, ensured that the county would be able to afford the project from its available revenue and would not have to raise taxes or issue a bond.

"We were not going to raise taxes," he said.

Brown said that if successful, the framework Northampton set up will also hopefully be able to be re-used by the county -- to build more bridges.

"One of the difficulties was there was no template for us to follow," he said. "We really wanted to create and identify a model that was sustainable.

"Now that we have that done ... hopefully we'll be able to execute again a couple of years down the road based on our cash availability," Brown said. "You get 99 bridges done in 20 to 30 years ... they have a 75 year shelf life ... we'll be done with bridges -- at least for a while."

Bad bridges by county

The following map shows the total percentage of structurally deficient bridges in each county. It can also be broken down by state-owned or locally-owned bridges. Mousing over (or tapping) on a county will show the breakdown for that county.